NICOLE SCHMOELZER

Nicole Schmölzer (born 1968, Switzerland) is a painter. She was introduced to paintingat an early age through the art school Martenot (1975-88) and completed pedagogical studies at Martenot in Paris in 1988-89. While teaching art for the following 10 years to different ages and in different institutions, she studies art science and literature/linguistics at the Universities in Basel and Geneva concluding with her thesis on Josef Albers’ Interaction of color. Her interest in the wide field of art ranges from  personal expression to the social and historical, as well as philosophical and economical meaning. She completed her postgraduate program on Cultural Studies in Berlin and Basel (1998, 2003-04) by writing a research on company related art awards.

Since 1995 Nicole Schmölzer has been working regularly with different galleries showing her work in Europe and the United States. She has received grants from the Art OMI Foundation NY, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in New Mexico, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain.

In her painting, she focuses on the substantive properties as well as the interactive capacities of color. Her intention is to challenge the limits of color. As she generates greater subtleties in behavior and movement of the medium, the fluidity of the paint becomes structural. She uses the terms “modeling” and “pushing the color back” to describe her processes of application, spreading, washing off, and abrasion of pigment into and off the primed surface. Choosing oil paint for its luminosity, she studies how the layers of colors emit transcendence in their relationship to the shifting planes of dimension. Schmölzer travels these spatial relationships with her innate ability to translate the boundaries between interior dialogue and imposed definition, between organic experience and applied order.